Growing up Catholic
I was an altar boy from when I was — and since I was — a boy. Can’t remember how I first got involved, except attending Catholic school, that might have had something to do with that. I don’t recall being enthralled with the idea, but it wasn’t so terrible either. This was weighty stuff for an eight-year-old. After a while, it just became one of those things growing up Catholic.
Back then, the Mass was prayed in Latin. Learning church Latin wasn’t too hard, and giving the requisite responses to the priest’s prayer didn’t feel like a big deal. My mother used to say I didn’t talk until way late, but once I started, I’d lecture the world from my crib. Talk is never an issue with an Irish lad.
However, wearing a black wool cassock in South Carolina humidity in a church with zero air-conditioning was none too pleasant — and the wool made me itch — but it wasn’t torture or nothing. I suppose I didn’t screw up so much — I was tapped to serve the bishop when he’d make a showing at the little missionary church in Carolina. Missionaries in amongst the Southern Baptists, or so the nuns thought.
My grandmother certainly thought we were. She’d speak to our neighbors, the Russells next door. “Mrs. Russell’s a fine woman,” but otherwise she’d keep to herself. When my father was dying, she had packed her clothes at seventy-two and left Wilkes Barre for the ‘heathen’ South to help her daughter raise her family. It wasn’t like she didn’t love us, but there was a quiet distance to her, not unloving, but she wasn’t my mother.
As an altar boy, lighting the high candles flanking the tabernacle was fun. First you lit the bronze candlelighter, sliding the wick far enough forward so it wouldn’t snuff out during the process, then raise it way over your head aiming for each candle — a shaky hand and you’d miss it. On Sundays, when there were two of us, I’d usually be the one to light them. Middle of the week, I’d have the show to myself. Following Mass, one of us would go back over the candles one by one with the candle snuffer at the other end of the candlelighter.
Likewise burning incense was cool, and the bell you needed to ring at the Agnus Dei and when the priest raised the host — I was one hell of a bell ringer.
My grandmother had a bell to call us kiddos in for supper when she’d become tired of yelling — I wonder if that’s the same thing.
St. Ann’s was rather grim-looking red brick church, but it had one mother of a bell in the unadorned tower, only it was hardly ever rung — either because of superstition or a wiser caution since the thing shook that whole part of the church. It had a deep-timbered tone, like this was a serious moment I should pay attention to. Using that bell, it took a man — or at least a man’s strength — to call the faithful to God. I remember our boy scout leader rang it at Christmas for midnight Mass. He was ex-military and hailed from Yugoslavia so he was Eastern Orthodox, though he attended our church — his was probably the only Eastern Orthodox family living in Sumter.
Maybe Southern Baptists didn’t believe in ringing bells — too much like the Papists? Dunno.
In our catechism class, I was instructed by the prim nuns in wimples that God was present in the Communion. And that God was a man — God became man — what He might have been before that wasn’t so clear.
My buddies in the neighborhood were all Protestants, and they had their own church rituals — and Sunday School. Comparing notes, my buddy Barry and I agreed my not having to attend Sunday School was an advantage. The older nuns hinted that Protestants weren’t going to heaven — and Barry explained he’d heard pretty much the same thing in reverse. Seemed to us that adults took religion seriously, but between us, if we needed a last kid to balance the football teams, it was no big deal.
Being the only boy in a household of women, I was the family’s sole male anointed by the Church to attend a priest. So I served. This distinction didn’t seem worth bragging about to my sister, Susan. I was always looking for leverage, but this wasn’t too useful for getting a rise out of her. Just the way things were. Rumor was we had a bishop in the family, though I don’t know who he was, or when. My cousin, Mark, became a priest. Still is and he’s got to be retirement age by now.
My mother said she didn’t know why women couldn’t be priests — made no sense, she said. She was a feminist before her time. Something about having to support a family on her own might have made her feel that way. I don’t recall whether she agreed with those regs, the vows of priests and nuns not to marry, but she herself lived the better part of her life as a celibate, seeing Daddy died so young. It was passing curious, why she never remarried, though I never really considered how it might be, living with a man in the house. She probably did.
Sure, I missed him. Not all the time. Only times when my mother seemed lonely — or Granny worried out loud about her oldest child not having him. I saw how other kids had fathers to teach them stuff I had to learn on my own. It was a handicap, learning to ride a bike on my own — my sisters rode, so I figured I could, wobbly wheeled or not. Barry had an older brother who taught him sports; he had the advantage there.
The only men in my life were my two uncles, Uncle George and Uncle Phil. Uncle George I liked because he had my mother’s sense of humor, always with a twinkle in his eye, and he’d freely admit he loved his older sister. Uncle Phil was married to my mother’s younger sister; he was the quieter one.
Uncle Phil was a railroad man. On one visit he started a backyard train track, showed me how to carve tiny wooden rail cars out of inch-long blocks of wood, lay the wire tracks running through the lawn using parallel sections of wire strands I’d poke the ends down into the dirt. Nails in the bottom of each car, so they stayed between the wire track. Of course, my laying the sprawl of track between the back porch door and the clothesline didn’t make Granny too happy, being sure she’d break an ankle, though that never happened.
Uncle George wrote an historical novel about Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania where my mother’s family was from. His novel was set in the years before the Revolution when the pioneers were fighting the Natives. He brought it with him on one visit and lent it to me to read. His only copy. I was impressed that he’d written an entire novel on his own, a couple hundred pages at least, and it touched me that he wanted to share it. I’d already written a few short pieces by then. Funny, how these things stay with you.
And so we don’t go too far down that road, I was never molested by a priest, and I’d have remembered. Probably more than a few of us made it through unscathed. The older priest was grumpy at early morning Mass. One younger priest seemed to have his stuff together, well educated, quick witted. Though the priests and nuns never marrying, that was weird to me. And the few times I was in the rectory, it seemed like these several men were living in temporary quarters, like they didn’t have a real home. Where were their families? That seemed lonely.
When I went off to Clemson, I continued attending Sunday Mass at the small chapel room they had on campus. Father Fisher was, without a doubt, the strongest influence on my turning away from the Vietnam War. He was a Jesuit, with all that entails when it came to debating skills. Father Fisher was a declared pacifist; I have to wonder how that made the staunch southern conservatives feel about him.
Looking back, what I took from my Catholic upbringing was more my mother’s self-sacrifice and her morality than the theology. The nuns had taught it as the ‘word of God,’ but the literal story never stuck. My mother’s deeper belief in a higher order, in a higher moral plane, stayed with me.
That and family; those were bedrock for her, so it became the same for her three children — no question she was the reason I knew should I ever have children, I couldn’t leave them. I never have.
