Tag: nuns

Catholic Born

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

You know that part of the scripture they read at Christmas where they recite the lineage from Abraham to Isaac, to Jacob, and then about thirty five others who were all “begot’ until they finally get down to Joseph, the father of Jesus? I once asked a priest that if Jesus was really the result of the ”Virgin Birth,” as I was taught, then aren’t all of those guys on that lengthy list just his step-father’s dead relatives? For some reason, he seemed annoyed with me.

Either through fate, family history, or some combination of parental decisions, personal calls, happenstance, or whatever other forces out there control one’s destiny, I am and always have been pretty Catholic.

Consider the facts. I was baptized Catholic, owe every academic credential I have to Catholics schools, once thought I would be a priest, have worked for priests, brothers and nuns for a collective total of about eleven years (and counting) of my varied career, was active in parish leadership, raised my kids Catholic and, as far as I know, am in good standing with the church. And I married a Catholic girl even more Catholic than me. Who else do you know can recite from memory the list of priestly vestments (chasuble, alb, cincture, and some other stuff), the seven deadly sins (gluttony, sloth, and more bad things you shouldn’t do) and the Memorare? I won’t even go into her devotion to Mary, which is some sort of happy feminist spiritual preference, as if Mary is the only saint who can be really trusted, most of the rest being men.

That old Catholic church that defined much of my youth seems like a distant memory now. I remember it as a Church of ironclad and seemingly timeless rules, the endless list of things we did and said that seem so silly now. Taking communion on your tongue without biting into the host, never touching a chalice (some boy did, we were told, and he died), fasting, wearing scapulars like G.I. dogtags, writing AMDG or JMJ on top of each page of schoolwork, rosaries, novenas, masses with school attendance taken, mortal and venial sins, purgatory, hell, telling your oft-repeated three or four pre-adolescent sins to some guy in a box each week.

Today, I’m not an angry Catholic, just a mystified and somewhat dissatisfied one. Along the way I jettisoned most of the doctrinal baggage so carefully installed by a host of nuns and priests in my formative years. It’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, and it’s not a loss of faith. It’s just that over time I grew to consider it just so much extra unimportant detail to the core of the message.

The list of lost luggage is lengthy and includes the aforementioned virgin birth, the immaculate conception, transubstantiation, the need for male celibate priests, the assumption of anyone’s actual body into heaven, Jesus as something other than an extraordinary man, little cherub angels, purgatory, plenary indulgences that mirrored our federal prison parole guidelines, demons, wood from the True Cross, and the many heads of John the Baptist scattered throughout Europe. And I might do a run-on sentence like this last one, but I don’t do confession.

Some things have added to my cynicism. On my first visit to Rome, I visited the Vatican Museum, a garish monument to the Catholic Church’s rich history of basically ripping off anything of value from Europe or Africa and the Middle East that wasn’t nailed down. After about 200 statues, I had seen enough. I have visited the Knock shrine in Ireland, held so dear by its locals, but which, like Fatima and Lourdes, has evolved into a bit of a religious side show. I have seen the 35 foot-tall silver aluminum statue of Mary as it made its rounds to churches in Chicago, rising like a sort of devotional ICBM from a flatbed truck, the personal penance of some poor guy who once owned liquor stores, or so I heard. It hasn’t exactly deepened my faith.

I have tried to center my faith on the essential meaning of Jesus, a man who came along at a moment in history and told us to love each other, forgive each other, to stop stealing from each other, conquering each other, and butchering each other. Simple enough instructions that we still haven’t mastered, but I can admire and try to follow the playbook well enough.

He came at a time when the world was maybe for the first time ready to start listening, and his message grew from that point onward as a force for good, through apostles, martyrs, and simple people in search of answers. He didn’t need to be anything other than an exceptionally good man of God to start the world in a new direction, and, as so often happens, they killed him for it. His story and his meaning doesn’t require that he be born without human intercourse, that he be some sort of “man-god” or even that he rise from the dead.  I realize that the Church, if they really thought me important enough (they don’t) to single me out for these beliefs, could deny me last rites and burial in a Catholic cemetery, but I have my cremation “get out of jail free” card, so I’ll take my chances. Just scatter my ashes on the 6th hole at Ridge Country Club.

So I still go to Mass most Sundays, perhaps missing during a week when we attend a funeral or if the weekend is too crowded. I go there usually pleasantly, grateful for the quiet comfort of being part of a large group of people whom I assume are of similar thought and belief as me. I go hoping to hear a good homily, but those are as rare these days as political elections that I feel good about. I go to enjoy the music, especially a good choir. I go to spend an hour with my wife at my side where we just “are”.  Sometimes I just go out of a sense of obligation. Sometimes I go when I really do feel the need to pray for something.

But lately I feel like I am a tenant in a building where many people are moving out and no one is moving in. The Catholic Church is in a downward spiral, or maybe a downward spiral with a turn to the right. Fewer churches, fewer active members, some moving to evangelical churches that mange to better answer their needs. As I write this, some 26 Chicago parishes need pastors and only 19 are available.

And of those 19, how many would you feel good about? I lost count of the number of stories I have heard about some Catholic priest denying marriage, requiem mass, or baptism in their church based on attendance at mass or donation records. I recently sat through an embarrassing 30-minute harang by a pastor to an absolutely packed church regarding his personal expectations of the churchgoers in terms of promptness, singing, and leaving early. Bite me, father. An archbishop who I actually went to school with will not bury gay Catholics in his diocese, even though death kind of settles your sexuality issues.  It’s not just quantity, but quality.

Orders of nuns, priests, and brothers are in their sunset years now, with pathetically few younger members. The model that once attracted so many young new leaders, myself included, is broken. And the endless file of the sexually abused and the indefensible cover-ups by the hierarchy have all but snuffed out the flames of devotion in even the most Catholic of Catholics. But the voice of “super Catholics” seems to be on the rise, those homophobic, pro-life, pro-death penalty (I’ll never get that) adherents to Doctrine as defined in Rome. A bleak future, if we change nothing.

Much of this downward spiral, and this is most mystifying of all, is driven by the insistence of a male celibate priest model. We are watching parishes around the country being rolled into other parishes, and not really for lack of enough faithful, as for lack of leadership. The hierarchy tries to fill in the holes with young priests from the third world or Eastern Europe. They might as well try extra-terrestrials, as I have witnessed homilies so out of touch with our reality as to generate good stories at parties. Some zealous kid from Manilla or Krakow, however well meaning, is not the answer. Nor are lay deacons, who do a good job, but who are too few in number.

The solutions are obvious and, I think, probably acceptable to most Catholics not on the extreme right: drop the requirement for celibacy for men and allow women to be ordained. Do those two things, or even one or the other, and your shortage of ministers problem goes away in a few years. Fact is, being a priest is not a bad job and people who are sensitive and compassionate and who want to make a difference will find it a natural calling. I happen to work in a place with some amazing nuns who would be terrific pastors, and a damned sight better at preaching than the last five guys I endured. When it comes to ministry, it’s like we have one hand tied behind our collective backs and our “top down” authority structure shows no sign of movement. Therein lies the dissatisfaction.

I remarked to one of the sisters recently that I often wondered “Why am I still Catholic?”

She shrugged, smiled, and said, “Where else would we go?”

Where, indeed?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sisters

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

“A soldier of the legion lay dying in Algiers,

There was lack of woman’s nursing, there was a dearth of woman’s tears”

-from the poem “BINGEN ON THE RHINE” By Caroline E. Norton (1808 – 1877)

 

We stood at attention in our platoon formations, four or five abreast, ten ranks deep, all in uniform, on a crisp September morning. Our platoon leader stood in front of our formation, back to us. Other platoons were all around us, same uniforms, with their platoon leaders in front of them. We all faced toward the center of the large asphalt covered yard, toward the empty flagpole. In spite of the great numbers assembled, more than a thousand, it was utterly quiet. You could hear birdsong from the nearby park. Shortly, two drummers and two buglers and a lone uniformed young man came into view. The small detachment marched to the military tattoo being rhythmically played out by the drummers. When they reached the flagpole they stopped marching and drumming. The young man took an American flag from under his arm, unfolded it enough to fix the grommets on the flag onto the catches on the rope.

The buglers began to play and the drummers started a slow roll of backdrop as the flag slowly began to rise to its position at the top. The music stopped. We raised our right hands over our hearts and, all as one, recited the Pledge of Allegiance. When we finished, the platoon leaders led us, formation by formation, into the nearby buildings. Once inside, we could hear John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post March blaring over the loudspeakers as we marched to our assigned positions.

No, I was not in the Army, at least not yet. I was seven years old and beginning my first day of first grade at Resurrection School on Chicago’s west side.

It seemed a bizarre, scary place to this scared first grader. I came from a big family, but they were all in other grades. I was on my own. It didn’t seem at all like kindergarten I attended the year before at nearby Robert Emmett Public School; that school was only a few hours a day, and offered naps and treats and games and playtime. Not at all like today’s kindergarten programs, which feature foreign languages and in which you may be required to defend your dissertation. This was loud, and crowded and scary, with kids of all ages.

My platoon leader/ classroom teacher was Sister Mary Owen, RSM. She was young and pretty; at least I thought she must have been if you could see past the habit she wore. It showed only her face and hands, that pretty face encased in a framed white starched cardboard headpiece. Her dress was black and she wore a starched white breastplate and wore a large black rosary as both a belt and a sort of accessory running down one side. She wore a black veil over her head. This was the official outfit of a Religious Sister of Mercy. There were other flavors of nuns, I would learn, and they had their distinctive outfits, also. Sisters of Providence, Franciscans, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who I always thought sounded like a ball club.

We were about fifty kids to a room (we had a class photo every year, and the proof of those numbers is there), the products of the post war baby boom, when millions of G.I.’s, sailors, and airmen came back with pretty much one idea in mind. And millions of lonely women thought it was a pretty good idea, too. Procreation was practically the national pastime in the late 1940’s and early to mid-50’s and it filled classrooms quickly.

Our uniforms were tan shirts and maroon ties for boys, tan blouses and maroon plaid jumpers for the girls. The girls’ jumpers also carried a patch with the Resurrection logo on it. If you were number one or two in the family birth order, you probably wore new shirts, or blouses and jumpers. Come later to the party and you were probably wearing hand-me-downs from an older sibling or a neighbor. Kids mostly carried their books in book bags or by hand, backpacks being reserved at that time for mountain men, soldiers, and Sherpa guides. When the Chicago weather arrived, you hung your coat in the “cloak room” which ran alongside the classroom and, as I recall, where discipline was sometimes distributed to children whose behavior was unacceptable.

———————-

It seemed to this boy that I had entered into a world run by women, which I believe could be said of most elementary schools. The principal and almost all of the teachers were nuns. The few lay teachers were women. And in such a world those things that are important to most women come to define the rules of the day. Things like order. Things like having a plan and then processing in an orderly fashion. Things like discipline. Things like kindness.

I was scared that first day. So many strange faces, and when Sister Owen called the role, asking each student in turn to raise their hand and speak their name, I could only raise my hand, too scared to speak. She let me off the hook and we set about the business of learning our ABCs, mostly reciting after her.

At some point, my nervousness got the better of me and I had an accident, and not the kind any kid wants to have. Sister Owen was quick to spot it. She swooped me up and carried me to the restroom, then known as the lavatory,  dismissing two older boys with a glare, who knew better than to mess with “Sister“. Like a mother caring for her own child, this young woman cleaned me off, asked me if I was OK, soaked my soiled undies and wrapped them in cellophane (who the hell carries cellophane?) and brought me by hand back to the classroom. I was somewhere between mortified and grateful. I’m not sure the other kids even noticed.

At the end of that first day, she handed me a note for my mother, explaining my little accident and telling me to have a better day tomorrow. I joined the orderly procession out the door, feeling utterly miserable and alone. And that is when I saw my oldest sister Maureen at the top of the stairway. She had on her plaid jumper, her black hair in curls and was talking to the girl next to her. My sister was a “good eighth grade girl” as the nuns would say. “Good eighth grade girls” could be depended upon to perform any task from cleaning the blackboards to tutoring slower students, to probably running the whole school, if asked.

She turned her head and saw me at the bottom of the steps and broke into a wide, welcoming smile. It was the kind of Big Sister smile that says, “I see you. It’s going to be OK. I’ve got you.” And I knew then that I wasn’t alone and that there were people there who cared about me. I was going to be OK. She carries that same smile even today and she has always shared it freely with all who need it.

God bless all sisters, those who took vows to earn that title and those who were members of your family. We’re lucky to have had them.