Tag: resurrection

Catholic Born, Part Deux

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

When I posted a recent article called “Catholic Born,” I got a few responses from readers. Some indicated they felt much the same way as I did, and I suspect those who remained silent disagreed either a little or maybe a lot with what I wrote, but that’s OK.   It was one comment made by my daughter Julie that kind of hit home. She told me “Thanks for not being a priest, dad. Even with all its flaws, and there are many, I find comfort in the rituals.”

While there was little danger of me ever becoming a priest, it made me realize that as I laid out my thoughts on the many teachings of the Catholic Church that I have discarded, as well as the dissatisfaction I feel over current church rules, I missed something important. Being raised Catholic is as much the culture you live in as it is any set of personal beliefs. Leaving that culture behind you is as rare and as difficult as a lifelong White Sox fan waking up one morning and buying season’s tickets for Wrigley Field.

A bit about that culture……………….

The stories:

I was twelve years old and standing in line in front of my dad at the door to the confessional in Resurrection Church on the west side. It was Holy Saturday and all four confessionals were doing a land office business, confession back then being a weekly requirement before taking communion the next day. Lines were long to the left and right of each set of boxes and the little lights above the doorways to forgiveness flashed from red to green as sinners concluded their litany, got their penance, and rose from the kneelers inside their compartments. It reminded me of old war movies where the paratroopers had their eyes glued on the light near the door of the C-47, waiting to jump into combat when the light turned green.

Each confessional consisted of three doors, the center door being reserved for the priest, and the two outboard doors for the sinners. The name of the priest inside was on a nameplate over his door, and people had their favorites, much like shopping for a more lenient judge in court. You wanted absolution, but you wanted it with the least amount of guilt and pain.

The priest sat in a chair and pulled open a screen on his side which allowed you, the sinner, to hear his voice and sort of see his shadow. Before he opened your screen, he could be heard mumbling back and forth with the sinner on the other side of the box. You always tried to listen in and catch the other guy’s treacherous failings, or maybe pick up a new, harmless sin you could use next week, but you could never quite make it out. Once your screen opened, it was Showtime and you went into your lines: “Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been (your answer here) since my last confession.”

I was next up in that line and my father, not the most patient of men, began to fidget; whoever the person was in that box ahead of me was in there for a long time. Each time another light flashed and a door opened in one of the other confessionals, he sighed, looked at his watch, shook his head, looked around. I could sense it building. It was clear that the priest and the sinner were having a long talk, because the poor guy in the box on the opposite side was stuck in there, awaiting his turn. The sinners behind us, eager to get forgiveness and then hit the grocery store, began deserting for shorter lines or faster moving lines. But we were next and so we were stuck.

Finally, his fuse finished burning and he blew. In a voice everyone in the church could hear, he said “Well I guess they got the guy who shot Lincoln!” Those working off their penances, kneeling in the pews, were startled. Some of the older ladies threw him looks of disapproval. Some of the men could be seen shaking with laughter but trying not to show it. Kids had their mouths open in surprise. And me? I wanted to die, but that’s because I was twelve. And the endless conference inside that confessional ended a few seconds later, so perhaps the priest or the sinner took the loud hint from outside.

——————-

Mass always began with the priest standing between two kneeling altar boys, all with our backs to the faithful. The priest spoke first: “Introibo ad altare Dei” (I will go up onto the altar of my God).

We as the altar boys responded in unison: “Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” (The God who gives joy to my youth).

It was Latin, but it might as well have been Swahili or Kurdish. We didn’t understand a single word of it. To become an altar boy, you had to memorize all of the Latin words of the mass on a small four page card and know when to say the words. No English translation was supplied and none was considered necessary.

I’m not sure how much joy to my youth was brought about by serving 6 a.m. mass on a February morning, but I had more than my share of those mornings. Mass came in several flavors for altar boys: early weekday masses (attended by about the same fifteen people every day), Sunday mass, both high mass (longer and with more singing) and low mass (mercifully shorter), funerals (four altar boys required) and weddings (only two required).

My best day as an altar boy was a big Italian wedding, where the best man handed each of us an envelope with $15 inside. The priest asked if we had been paid anything so that it could go to the “Altar Boy Fund” and I and my partner Bill lied through our teeth. Fifteen dollars in 1962 felt like winning the lotto. No one could have more money than that all at one time, and I was, at least for a time, quite wealthy. Anyway, I’d cover the lie vaguely at confession the following week and certainly not to the same priest.

Second best were all of those days when you were called upon for funeral duty. Catholic funerals were always on weekdays, so you got out of class for the hour of the service, and another 45 minutes of goof-off time, which you could easily alibi to the nuns as a service that ran long.

—————-

The Gospels

You remember Martha and Mary, those two sisters of Lazarus who entertained Jesus during a stopover in Bethany? Martha was all about working the event, but Mary just sat at His feet listening to him. When Martha went to file a beef with Jesus about her lazy sister, she got a rebuke from the Man himself. She was too concerned with earthly things, He said. I wonder if He might have been a bit less critical after not getting fed and watered, had Martha not been running the show and looking after her guests.

Every woman in every family knows who the Marthas are and who the Marys are. Marthas plan the parties, clean the house, shop for the goodies, get the meal out, look after their guests and clean up after. Marys sit, drink wine, and chat. Every family is a mix of the two and each side knows it, seems to accept that you’re one or the other by nature and not likely to change. Marthas at a party bond together in their righteousness and volunteer to help each other out. They can be found in the kitchen. Marys won’t leave their chairs unless the wine runs out. They can be found on the patio or in the living room.

You know which one you are, ladies.

————-

You know the story of the prodigal son. Kid asks for an early inheritance, leaves town, blows it all on hookers and booze, then comes home broke and penitent. Good old dad rejoices in his return. Older brother, Steady Eddie, is a bit pissed.

For years, I identified with the older brother, thought that dad telling him “but you are with me always” sounded a lot like “and you’re chopped liver.” Your brother is a jerk, but gets forgiven by dad and even celebrated like he did something right for once in his life. Which he didn’t. Meanwhile, you toed the line, worked the farm, and did everything you were supposed to and nobody is putting fine robes on your back or slaughtering any fatted calves in your honor. Raw deal all around.

This was my take on this gospel story for years, until someone shared their interpretation with me. This person, an experienced dad like myself, said he shared my take for years. But looking back on it all, he now concludes that the true meaning of the story was that raising kids was a pain in the butt. Who am I to argue?

———–

The Homilies

I don’t know how many homilies I’ve heard, but just doing the math it has to be more than three thousand. And only three still stay with me.

The two frogs….

The first was given by Father Flannery, a priest at Resurrection who was also a decorated Marine Corp chaplain and who was wounded at Iwo Jima. I was in first grade and I remember his homily about the two frogs who jumped into a pail full of milk. Both were struggling to keep from drowning. One gave up and did indeed drown, but the other frog had some sort of amphibious faith and kept swimming and kicking and, lo and behold, churned the milk into butter. The butter gave him a solid surface from which to jump free of the pail. Keep kicking was the message I guess.

My brother and the apostles…

Father Joe Mulcrone, a Resurrection guy, said the funeral homily when my brother Bill was killed in a car accident in 1979. We were shattered at the time, numb from disbelief, and in need of some comforting words. Fr. Joe’s homily compared Bill with the apostles. He pointed out that the apostles, like Bill, were no saints when Jesus found them. He concluded that Bill would have been comfortable in their company. His words began the long healing process for all of us and I am grateful to him to this day.

The guys travelling to the next town….

Father Bill Gubbins was a gifted homilist in Queen of Martyrs parish. He told the tale of the traveler who upon arriving at a town gate, asked an old man sitting nearby about the people in the town. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?” replied the old man. “Awful, terrible people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I’m afraid you’ll find these people much the same.”

Later on, another traveler came to the same town, and again asked the same old man near the gate the same question. “What kind of people live here?” he asked. The old man again replied, “How were the people in the last town you were in?”  “Kind, wonderful people,” the traveler answered. “Well,” said the old man, “I think you’ll find these people much the same.”

Yes, quite a culture.

 

“My first husband bombed Osaka,” and other stories of the late, great Rita Wogan

Posted on by tom.wogan@comcast.net

 

The young Japanese girl was living in my sister Terese’s home in the beautiful Partry Mountains in the west of Ireland. She had been sent there to learn English, although the notion of sending the Japanese to Ireland to learn English always struck me as kind of curious. The Irish have put their own twist on the language centuries ago and it’s not mainstream Oxford English or American English, but its own wonderful concoction of unique phrases, words turned upside down, and meanings that are very different to the Irish than they might be to the rest of the English speaking world. Case in point: my mother (she spent several months each year visiting her daughters and grandkids in Ireland) often used the word “fanny” as in “Child, you better start behaving or I’ll paddle your fanny.” However, “fanny” in Ireland translates into the word “vagina”; my nieces had to work up the courage to tell their grandmother that she was talking like a porn star. Another example: my Irish brother-in-law Jim refers to a nursing home as a “home for the bewildered.”  Try that one stateside.

My sister had taken in several Japanese students over the years, allowing them to pick up some of the local culture along with their adopted tongue. This particular girl, perhaps because she was terrified to be in a new country by herself, or overwhelmed by the activity levels in a house filled with six kids, or just being simply a timid soul, had barely uttered a word since her arrival. My mother, Rita Wogan, among the most verbal of people, set out to remedy that situation. She began to query the timid girl, trying to pry out of her a name, which she did, and her age, which she also got. My mother pressed on, asking here what part of Japan she was from. The girl shyly blurted out that she was from Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. Delighted that they finally had something in common, my mother exclaimed, “Osaka, why my first husband bombed Osaka!” Which in point of fact was true back in 1945, but I have tried without success for many years to think up a comeback for that line.

—————–

My mother gave my wife and me the gift of her time when we were both just starting to travel a bit. We would take four day jaunts to various cities once a year or so and she would stay with the kids. They loved her visits, which were filled with stories, lots of baked goods and some pretty goods meals. The meals, just like our lunches at home on a school day, were often accompanied by lectures. Topics varied from the depression, the war, the holocaust (her personal favorite), to issues of morality. On one such visit, my two daughters, then in their teen years, got an earful of her views on the problems with modern relationships. The problem, she stated was the “C” word, of which there was not enough of, apparently.

My daughters were understandably confused, so Eileen ventured a guess as to what she meant by the “C” word. She guessed “condoms”. My mother was horrified and sputtered “Commitment! Commitment!” “How did you girls ever hear about condoms?”

Mom had just learned what the prosecuting lawyers in the O.J. trial had learned the hard way. Don’t ask any question to which you don’t already know the answer.

—————-

My friend Christine Clancy once confided that when she first met me, she thought that there were twenty or more children in my family. A logical mistake, given Rita Wogan’s penchant for giving most of the kids in the Wogan family a nonsense name, or two names, or three. I won’t embarrass them by repeating them here; they have had to suffer with those names all their lives. We often still call each other by those names.

But Minnie, Poodie, Tassi, Soona, the late Binky, and Finn-man, you know who you are. As Herman Melville said in the last line of Moby Dick, “I alone escaped to tell thee.” Oh, and my sister Maureen escaped without a nonsense name, too.

—————

Put the word “teat” in front of twelve year boy and you’re off to the races. During another of my mother’s kid-watching visits while we travelled, she told the kids how she helped a lamb on one of my sisters’ farms in Ireland. Lambs tended to come into the world all around the same time, I guess, and mom loved “lambing season.” One of the adult lambs had a cracked and sore nipple, so she told the kids how she saved the day with her Mary Kaye moisturizer. She sold Mary Kaye products for years, and she honestly believed they had a product that would solve any problem from acne to insomnia.

What she told the kids, with my then 12 year old son in attendance, was that she restored the lamb’s ailing spigot by applying Mary Kaye’s cream to the lamb’s teat. My son lost it in a fit of laughter, which is about what any 12 year old boy would do. My mother, somewhat indignantly, asked him, “Well, what you have me call it?” He lost it all the more.

—————-

She once enlisted the aid of my Uncle Jimmy and some poor nun in stealing a plaque from the chapel in the old Resurrection parish. The bronze plaque, which hung at the back of the Memorial Chapel in the basement of the “Old School”, contained the names of parishioners lost in WW II. Her first husband’s name was on that grim, heroic list. When she heard that the school building was about to be razed, she made a visit to the chapel. Resurrection Parish in that year was (and still is) a lot like a war zone, but that didn’t stop her. She brought her brother Jimmy, a retired copper, for firepower.

She located the plaque, now gathering dust on the floor, and asked the pastor if she might have it. He declined, probably thinking she was a bit off to be hanging about in this neighborhood to begin with. So naturally, she enlisted some poor nun who was formerly at the school and the three of them returned and walked in and calmly loaded the plaque into Jimmy’s massive Mercury Marquis trunk. Mercury Marquis, by the way, are the preferred weapons of choice for senior drivers.

She needed to find it a new home, and learned of a Chicago Firefighters museum that was being planned. So her logic went like this: Resurrection was the parish whose pastor was also the Fire Dept. Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman. My dad was one of his drivers. So therefore, the Firefighters Museum would want this plaque. When I explained to her that the names on the plaque included dead soldiers and not dead fireman, she was unmoved. The firefighter museum guys were equally confused by this circular logic.

She eventually gave it to the Irish American Heritage Center where it supposedly sits with the other archives from a long ago West Side. She could be stubborn.

——————–

My siblings and their children each have their “Mom” or “Grandma”stories, which we share every time we’re together. She remains a happy point of light in all of our lives, especially looking back. Her many kindnesses, her ability to drive you nuts with her projects, her admonitions to “get over your pity party” to complainers and those feeling sorry for themselves, and her joyous approach to life has marked us all. We all miss our moms, I guess, but they have a way of living on in their stories and those stories take some of the sadness away from their departure. She still makes us smile.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms.

 

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.