E
edwest2
Guest
"In the fifties half of all American Catholic kids attended parochial schools, a figure unequalled before or since. Nancy and Bill and I were three of them. First grade was more than just the beginning of formal education. It was above all an initiation into a vast parallel culture.
"As I have already noted, every religious group formed its own subculture, some more closed to the outside world than others. Lutherans, Adventists, and some (mostly Orthodox) Jews also operated their own religious schools, and in Utah, as in much of the South, Mormon and Southern Baptist majorities effectively determined the religious ethos of public classrooms. But at mid-century only Catholics inhabited a parallel culture that, by virtue of their numbers, ethnic diversity, wide geographical distribution, and complex of institutions mirrored the outside “public” culture yet was manifestly different. We were surrounded by a membrane, not a wall, one that absorbed as much as it left out. It was, in other words, the means by which we became American as well as Catholic.
"Catholic education was the key. Through its networks of schools and athletic leagues, the church provided age-related levels of religious formation, learning, and belonging that extended through high school and, for some of us, on into college. Church, therefore, always connoted more than just the local parish: kids experienced it anywhere, including schools, where the Mass was said. In this way, Catholicism engendered a powerful sense of community—not because it sheltered Catholic kids from the outside world, as sectarian subcultures try to do, but because it embraced our dating and mating and football playing within an ambient world of shared symbolism, faith, and worship. In my adolescent years, for example, St. Christopher’s transformed its basement on Saturday nights into the “R Canteen” where teenagers from all over Cleveland’s West Side danced to juke-box music; a muscular young priest from the parish roamed the premises to prevent fights and keep the drunks at bay. Yes, Catholics felt like hyphenated Americans, but nothing in human experience, we also came to feel, was foreign to the church.
"In 1971, I looked back on that Catholic parallel culture and tried to capture for the readers of Newsweek the contours of a world that was already by then receding into history:
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"There was a time, not so long ago, when Roman Catholics were very different from other Americans. They belonged not to public school districts, but to parishes named after foreign saints, and each morning parochial-school children would preface their Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag with a prayer for Holy Mother the Church. When they went to Mass—never just a “Sunday service”—they prayed silently with rosaries or read along in Latin as if those ancient syllables were the language Jesus himself spoke. Blood-red vigil candles fluttered under statues and, on special occasions, incense floated heavily about the pews. Kneeling at the altar rail, their mouths pinched dry from fasting, the clean of soul were rewarded with the taste of God on their tongues—mysterious, doughy, and difficult to swallow. “Don’t chew the Baby Jesus,” they were warned as children, and few—even in old age—ever did.
"The Catholic Church was a family, then, and if there were few brothers in it, there were lots of sisters—women with milk-white faces of ambiguous age, peering out of long veils and stiff wimples that made the feminine contours of their bodies ambiguous too. Alternately sweet and sour, they glided across polished classroom floors as if on silent rubber wheels, virginal “brides of Christ” who often found a schoolroom of thirty students entrusted to their care. At home, “Sister says” was a sure way to win points in any household argument.
"Even so, in both church and home, it was the “fathers” who wielded ultimate authority. First, there was the Holy Father in Rome: aloof, infallible, in touch with God. Then there were the bishops, who condemned movies and sometimes communism; once a year, with a rub from a bishop’s anointing thumb, young men blossomed into priests and Catholic children of twelve became “soldiers of Jesus Christ.” But it was in the confessional box on gloomy Saturday nights that the powers of the paternal hierarchy pressed most closely on the soul. “Bless me Father for I have sinned” the penitent would say, and in that somber intimacy, sins would surface and be forgiven.
"There were sins that only Catholics could commit, like eating meat on Friday or missing Sunday Mass. But mostly the priests were there to pardon common failings of the flesh, which the timid liked to list under the general heading of “impure” thoughts, desires, and action. Adolescent boys dreamed of marriage when it would be okay by God and the fathers to “go all the way.” But their parents knew full well that birth control was not included in such freedom. Birth control was against God’s law, all the fathers said, and God’s law—like Holy Mother the Church—could never change."To be a Catholic child in the fifties was to imagine yourself at the center of concentric circles of belonging. They included not only the other Catholics that we knew, not only, even, all the Catholics we saw at other parish churches when traveling, but all Catholics who ever were or would be on the face of the earth—plus quite a few saints we knew by name who were now, we believed, with God in heaven but still close enough to talk to because they were always watching over us like grandparents looking down from high front porches.
"In other words, the religious identity we acquired in childhood was a primal identity that absorbed and conditioned all the others. This communal formation began, almost imperceptibly, with the transformation of the seasons.
"Like the public grammar school a block away, St. Christopher’s celebrated the diurnal cycle. In fall, we traced autumn leaves on the schoolroom windows; in winter, snowflakes, and come spring tulips and other icons of budding nature. But for us October and May were also the Virgin Mary’s special months when we prayed the rosary daily. November signaled the arrival of Advent, as well as of Thanksgiving, and so began the liturgical preparation for the birth of Jesus. Lent with its challenge—what should I give up?—followed all too soon in February, and in April the hymns we sang all anticipated the gravity of Good Friday—for me, still the most solemn day of the year—followed by the triumphal music of Easter Sunday and the end of Lenten austerities. In this way the seasons were subsumed into the liturgical cycle, and our narrative of time recast. And then the cycle recessed for the summer, like school itself, only to resume all over again in fall.
"Whatever the season, God was never far away in grade school. St. Christopher’s was structured like a U with the two classroom wings connected by the church. The church was not much larger than a chapel and to get from one wing to the other we had to pass through its silent, sacred space. Each time we entered and departed we blessed ourselves with holy water and genuflected briefly toward the altar. There, behind small gold doors and in the form of Eucharist bread, we knew, Jesus was always present. It was an intimacy easily assumed and not easily forgotten.
"During Lent and Advent, we attended Mass each morning before school, marching class by class to our assigned pews. On cold days we heaped our coats and metal lunch boxes on the hissing radiators, and before the mass was over the odor of warming bananas, fruit tarts and bologna, egg salad and peanut butter sandwiches permeated the church. Whenever the parent of a classmate died, we all attended the funeral. The casket was always open and one by one we all passed by, glancing sideways at the cushioned body. At funerals, the priest wore black vestments symbolizing death. On martyrs’ feast days he dressed in red, the color of spilt blood. White and gold expressing joy were reserved for special “feast” days like Easter. Otherwise, the priest appeared in green, the color of that quotidian virtue, hope. In class, we memorized mantra-like the questions and confident answers printed in our small blue Baltimore Catechisms. But it was from images and sounds and colors that we developed our specifically Catholic sensibility.
"Mass of course was said in Latin, a language only priests understood. By fourth grade, however, the boys at least were let in on the secret. In order to assist the priest at Mass, his back to the congregation, we were taught the Latin responses to the priest’s prayers; later we followed the entire Mass in our own missals, which provided the prayers in Latin on left-hand pages and English translations on the right. But the Latin I remember best, and still sing sometimes in the shower, were hymns like Panis Angelicus and the Dies Irae and the Pange Lingua we mastered as members of the boys’ choir. I have always thought the Church’s worst disservice to women was not the bar against ordaining them, but the failure to teach young girls church Latin.
