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I used to be Irish
Catholic.
I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American—you grow. George
Carlin
The single greatest influence in our lives
was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today,
especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly
conservative Catholic place.
I was part of what might have been the last
generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly
accepted the supernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and
transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints.
There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints
really did put in a good word for us every now and then.
Church was at the center of our lives. Being a Roman Catholic back then was no small
chore. In fact, it was a lot of work. The Mass was in Latin, conducted with the
priest’s back to the flock. (We were a flock. Protestant were the more
democratically named “congregation.”)
Aside from Sunday Mass there were also eleven
Holy Days of Obligation that we had to attend, and then there were the
all-important sacraments of First Confession, First Communion, and
Confirmation, all ornate and dramatic affairs that happened within a few years
of each other.
We dressed properly in a suit coat and tie
for Sunday mass. Fridays were meatless as a means of penance. At school, there
was prayer in the morning before classes began, prayer before lunch, prayer
after lunch and prayer before we went home. There was also a half-hour of
religion class every day. And there was fasting. In those days, Catholics
fasted eight hours before receiving communion.
Then there was confession on Saturday,
mandatory because Sunday Mass was also mandatory and so was taking Holy
Communion, which could not be accepted without first going to confession. We had to go to confession twice in a week:
once on Fridays, since the nuns were convinced none of us would go on our own
over the weekend, and then once again on Saturday afternoons when Helen made us
go.
When I made my first confession at age seven,
we were taught that there were two types of sin: mortal sins, which were
serious sins, and venial sins, which were lesser sins, lying and disobedience. The nuns said that we
would have to narrow our selection to venial sins since we were far too young
to have any mortal sins against our soul.
One of little girls in the group raised her
hand and asked, “What’s adultery?”
“Nothing to worry yourself over, dear,” the
nun answered, “It’s for adults, and it is a most grievous offense against God.”
I liked the sound of that, “most grievous offense against God.” Sounded
serious.
Confession was a big deal and involved a lot
of formality—kneeling in darkness, foreign languages, and solemnity—and I
didn’t waste all that somberness with unworthy sins, so when the priest slid
open the little wooden door that separated us in the dark I began my prayer.
“Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium
meorum peccatorum—” In full, the words meant “O my God, I am heartily sorry for
having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I fear the loss of
heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help
of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
Then the sins were confessed. I told the
priest I had committed adultery.
“Adultery, huh?” the priest said.
“Yes, Father,” I answered as solemnly as I
could. “Adultery.”
“So, how’d that work out for you?” he asked.
“Ah,” I answered, “you know.”
“No,” he said, “actually I don’t. So how many
times did you do this, this adultery?”
“Like, I think, three times, Father.”
“I see,” he said. “And during those times,
were you alone or with others?”
“No, Father,
I was alone.”
“And do you think you’ll be committing this
sin again in the near future?”
“Naw, Father,” I answered. “I’m pretty much
over it.”
As the years went and I became more
confessional-savvy, I learned that the dumber the sin, the lighter the penance,
the prayer for forgiveness that one was required to say up at the altar after
the confession had ended.
So in the name of efficiency, I developed a
pre-packaged list of dumb sins, like “I disobeyed my mother,” or “I fought with
my brother,” or “I failed to say my nightly prayer.”
Through trial and error, I learned that every
now and then I would have to toss a more serious sin into the mix or the
priests might get testy and tax me with a big penance. So I tossed in the
fail-safe sex sin, “I had evil thoughts about _____” and would fill in the name
of the girl who struck me at the moment. I rotated the sins and the priests,
and, overall, the system worked.
One Saturday, Denny and his gang of
desperadoes showed up for confession and slid into the pew with me and waited
for our turn at the confessional.
Denny turned to me and said, “Johnny, you got
any good sins?”
Feeling magnanimous, I shared my formula for
a hassle-free confession, and in closing said, “And then you say ‘I had evil
thoughts about Mary Puravich,’ or whatever,’” using the name of a pretty girl
from my class.
Denny shared my sin system with his friends,
who were always in a hurry to cut their way to the front of the line, have
their confessions heard, and leave without saying their penance. I went in to
the confessional and said my piece, ending with, “and I had evil thoughts about
Mary Puravich.”
“You know,” said the priest, “I gotta meet
this Mary Puravich. She must be some kind of knockout, because the last four
guys in here said the same thing about her.”
For all purposes, school was an extension of
church, and unlike the way we lived in Waterbury, school was no longer
optional. We were to be at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School, in
uniform, Monday through Friday from eight a.m. until three p.m. No excuses.
Because I lacked almost any formal education
at that point, I couldn’t read or write, so it was decided that I should start
school from the beginning—first grade—making me roughly two years older than my
classmates.
Assumption was already over fifty years old.
Walter and his sisters had been schooled there in the 1930s and the building ,
basically unchanged, had nothing sleek or new. It had sixteen classrooms for
two hundred and fifty students, no gymnasium or cafeteria, highly polished
wooden floors, and enormously large windows that each had to be opened and
closed with a long pole with a hook on the end of it.
Our teachers were members of the Sisters of
Mercy, an order formed in Ireland in 1831 to aid the poor, arriving in America
in 1843 to minister to the famished Irish flocking to the states. Several of
the nuns who had taught Walter were still living at the convent and filling in
as substitute teachers, and one or two of them were still teaching full-time.
Classes began with the ringing of an enormous
brass handbell by a nun who was strong enough to pick it up and move it around.
Boys and girls played apart from each other on different sides of the school
yard. The boys were clad in white shirts and green ties with the letter A sewn
into the middle of them, black slacks, black socks, and black lace-up shoes.
Loafers and pointed-toe shoes, then all the rage because of the Beatles, were
forbidden. The girls were required to wear black Mary Janes, white or green
knee socks, and a green dress uniform with an under slip, and a white,
button-down shirt. They were also issued green beanies to wear in church,
although I can’t recall that any of the girls ever wore one.
Just beneath the schoolyard was Farrell’s
Foundry. At different times of the day, the mill released its afterburn from
the enormous smokestacks that dotted the skyline. Tens of thousands of black
specks shot into the air, making it look like a black-snow blizzard had hit our
little town. The specks rained down on our white shirts, ruining them forever
with ink-black spots of burned iron.
Every school day started with a prayer, followed
by the Pledge of Allegiance and then religion class. Sometimes one of the
priests stopped by during religion class and opened the floor to discussions,
wrongly assuming the questions would be deep and theological. What he got was,
“Father, all right, look, if the Russians fired an atomic bomb at us and Jesus
flies out of heaven and swallows it and it explodes in his stomach—will he be
dead?”
The best one came from Peggy Sullivan, who
asked, “If Jesus shaves off his beard, will he lose all his magical powers?”
and then, pausing to catch her breath, “and if so, how screwed are we?”
One kid in the class, Patsy Sheehan, resented
having to learn certain things about our religion the difference between venial
sins and mortal sins, the Act of Contrition and so on. When the priest told us
we that we had to choose a middle name for our confirmation, Patsy complained,
“I got enough on my plate already.”
The priest insisted she pick a new middle
name. Patsy asked, “What’s Jesus’s middle name?”
“He’s Jesus. He doesn’t have one,” the priest
answered.
“So, what’s he, special?” Patsy asked.
Then there was Martin O’Toole, a wonderful,
magnificent liar. He lied in such awesome, Herculean fashion that his tales
were artful, Homeric. Our nun once asked, “Mr. O’Toole, why have you not turned
in your homework?”
Martin waited until he had everyone’s
attention and then stood slowly and dramatically from his desk, put his hands
on his tiny waist and said, “Sister, last night I was in my back yard playing
when I picked up a rock from the ground.” He then recounted the scene of him
picking up what must have been a boulder the size of Rhode Island, “and as soon
as I picked it up, oil! Bubbling crude came bursting out of the ground,
millions of gallons of it! I was soaked in oil.” He paused and looked around
the room and added, in hushed tones, “It took me hours to put that rock back on
that oil and save this entire city.”
He returned to his seat and said, “And that’s
why I didn’t time to do my homework, Sister.”
The nun’s jaw had dropped, and the silence of
the moment was broken only when Micky Sullivan, a dense and gullible child,
asked, “What kind of oil was it, Martin?”
“Esso,” he replied. “It was Esso oil.”
Many years later, Johnny became mayor of a
small town in the Valley. An investigation of the town’s finances showed fifty
thousand dollars missing from the treasury and all the evidence pointed to
Martin. When asked to produce the town’s books, Martin said, that “The books
are gone. Mice ate them.” He served two years in federal prison.
Then there was Ilene Flynn, a little
red-haired, freckled-faced, fair-skinned girl who was more pious than the Pope.
I knew a lot about her because the nuns thought we looked alike and paired me
with her for all religious functions.
At our First Holy Communion, Ilene was so
nervous her mouth went dry. Unable to swallow the host and forbidden to touch
it—only a priest could do that—she ran around in circles crying hysterically,
“Jesus is stuck in my mouth! Jesus is stuck in my mouth!” while the nuns
flocked around her shouting instructions about swallowing, “Go like this,
Ilene, go like this!” and then they did a swallowing demonstration that made
them look a lot like penguins eating long fish.
Ilene’s Friday afternoon confessions were
epic. She confessed to everything, I mean absolutely everything, and she
actually said all of her penance, unlike the rest of us who negotiated a
lighter-sentence deal with God before we got to the rail. My policy on penance
was one for five. If I were given thirty Hail Marys as penance, in the deal God
and I worked out, I said six.
Once, Ilene came out of the confessional in
tears, wailing loud enough to wake the dead.
“What is it, Ilene?” Sister asked. “What
happened?”
“Father O’Leary told me I’m going to hell on
a lying rap,” she wailed, “and I don’t know what a rap is!”
