Raised in the Bosom of the Church
There is a story about Jesus in the gospels of Mark and Luke that receives too little attention from the professional Church, the priests and nuns and eminences with satin beanies and palatial residences. Mark tells it like this:
People were bringing little children [or toddlers] to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Surely whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
Luke has the disciples even more authoritarian and off-putting than Mark: “when the disciples saw them, they sternly ordered them not to do it . . .”
It’s a great tale of Jesus’ warmth and physical affection – “he took them up in his arms . . .” The aspect of the story that I am focusing on here, however, is that it is the disciples of Jesus, the ‘true believers,’ the ‘in crowd’ that stood between the children and Jesus. It was the people closest to him who built a wall around him, attempting to fence Jesus in and fence the innocents out. I reveal my hostility toward clericalism in admitting that I can’t help thinking of those disciples as the ecclesial ancestors of the Church’s clerical caste, the professional God-guys, or at least the pharisaical ones, of whom I have known a good many.
With our home life on the Good Ship Clausen so precarious and sometimes stormy, my mother’s stabilizing keel notwithstanding, the major influence on Kitty and me other than our family was the Catholic Church. This influence was exercised mainly through parochial schooling at St. Leo’s Grammar School for both of us and Leo High School for me and Visitation High School for Kitty. The grammar school was run by the Sisters of Providence headquartered outside Notre Dame, Indiana. Leo was run by the Irish Christian Brothers and “Vis” by the Sinsinawa Dominicans with their motherhouse south of Platteville, Wisconsin.
As volatile as things could be at home, there was no visible volatility in the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, especially the Irish American version that ruled in Chicago and in St. Leo Parish. The Church taught us that it was infallible, immutable, incorruptible and, in its view, specially commissioned by God Himself to lead us little children to Jesus.
The Clausen kids were religious citizens of the great Archdiocese of Chicago, an ecclesial jurisdiction that covered almost 1,500 square miles in Cook and Lake counties. There were 4,200,000 people living in those counties in 1950 and 1,691,681 were officially Catholics, almost 40%, 80% of whom resided in the City of Chicago. The diocese was divided into 393 parishes, 341 of which had parish elementary schools runs by nuns.[1] There were 75 Catholic high schools.[2] There were almost 1,200 diocesan priests and another 1,000 religious order priests, 1,000 religious order brothers, and about 8,000 sisters. Running this vast operation was Samuel Cardinal Stritch who became archbishop of Chicago in 1940, promoted from his post as archbishop of Milwaukee.
In English feudalism after the Norman Conquest, all land was considered ultimately owned by the King. The king distributed the land to vassals who promised always to render him loyalty, often to pay him money and other things of value, and usually to provide troops to him for his wars. The top vassals, barons and earls, subdivided their tenures to subvassals who made similar promises of loyalty, rents, military service, or other ‘incidents of tenure’ in return for protection of their tenures by their immediate overlord. From the king to the barons though layers of ‘subinfeudation’ down to the lowest freeholder there existed a system of reciprocal rights and duties between lords and vassals.
This kind of system is still in play in the Catholic Church. The Pope has the role of King or more aptly Emperor, the ultimate owner of the Church’s dominions and principalities (in trust for God, of course.) He has his imperial court or curia. He divides the imperium into geographical and jurisdictional dioceses (much as the Late Roman Empire was divided into dioceses) in which the usual vassal is the local ‘ordinary’ or bishop, who owes fealty, obedience and a share of his revenues from the diocesan holdings to the Pope in return for the Pope’s loyalty and protection (witness the Pope’s cushy treatment of Bernard Cardinal Law after his resignation in disgrace from the Boston archdiocese.) The diocese in turn is subdivided geographically and jurisdictionally into parishes controlled by pastors who owe fealty, obedience and a share of the revenues from their parochial holding to the bishop in return for the bishop’s loyalty and protection (witness, as but one example, the bishops’ disgraceful protection of criminal priests in America, Ireland, Austria, and elsewhere.) It is all very feudal, based on personal power and loyalty relationships between lords and vassals. It is not mere tradition that causes the bishops to kneel before the Pope and kiss his ring or that calls for new priests and deacons to lie prostrate before their bishop during the Litany of Saints in the ordination liturgy in which they vow obedience to him, or that has the Pope addressed as “Your Holiness.” cardinals as “Your Eminence,” archbishops as “Your Grace,” and bishops as “My Lord.” These practices and many more have their roots in the imperial courts of the Roman Empire and in European feudalism. The Church’s feudal power structure was very much in force in the Chicago in which the Clausen children grew up. Our parish priests were accountable to our pastor, our pastor was accountable only to the archbishop who was accountable only to the Vatican.
Masters of the Universe: Cardinal Stritch flanked by auxiliary bishops
How the Church operated internally, e.g., how it handled its finances and its personnel, was kept secret from the “laity,” a term whose only meaning is negative: those who are not priests. How much money did the parishes provide to the archdiocese? How much did the archdiocese provide to Rome? How were bishops selected? How were pastors and curates selected? How were priests with alcohol or worse problems handled? These were not matters for the ‘laity,’ but rather for ‘the Church,’ i.e., the priestly caste. The Church was the clergy; the role of the laity was to pray, pay and obey. As Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical Vehementer Nos:
It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.
Since we lived at 73rd and Emerald, we were geographically and jurisdictionally a part of St. Leo the Great Parish whose church, school, rectory and convent were located between 77th and 78th Streets on Emerald Avenue.
St. Leo started out in 1885 as a mission of St. Anne’s parish at 55th and Wentworth, considerably north and east of our neighborhood. In 1887, it became a free-standing parish. Between 1897 and 1966, it had only 4 pastors. The first served from 1887 to 1913; the second from 1913 to 1918; the third from 1918 to 1950, and the fourth from 1950 to 1966. These long tenures – 26, 38, and 16 years - were very consistent with the feudal system under which the Church was governed. They contributed to the sense that the parish ‘belonged’ to the pastor, pretty much as a fiefdom, and that the pastor could keep it so long as he did right (loyalty, obedience, revenue generation and sharing) by the archbishop who granted him the fief.
The church Kitty and I attended was built in 1905 and dedicated in 1906 by Archbishop James Quigley. The former wooden church building was converted into the parochial school. The brick school building that Kitty and I attended was completed in 1916. It had 20 classrooms, 4 of which were used as a girls’ high school until Mercy High School was established in 1924 at 81st and Prairie, a bit east of our parish. In 1926, the parish built a boys’ high school, Leo High, staffed by the Irish Christian Brothers. The parish had a heavy population of Irish immigrants after the First World War, people fleeing the fighting and repression in Ireland (“the goddamned Black and Tans”) during the armed struggle for independence and the civil war that followed.
Our first pastor was Monsignor Shrewbridge, who died in 1950. I have no memory of him. The pastor we were familiar with as children was the Very Reverend or Right Reverend (I don’t remember which[3]) Monsignor Patrick J. Malloy, like his patron Cardinal Stritch an Irish-American. Monsignors were an honorary step above priests. They often, like Monsignor Malloy, got granted the monsignorial title because they excelled in raising resources, i.e., money, for the burgeoning Church.[4] If Monsignor Malloy was a Christian, he gave little evidence of it. I recall him as a bossy, crabby, nasty old guy who cracked the whip in church on Sundays and extracted money from his working class parishioners. I have no recollection of him talking about the life of Jesus or the Good News at mass or anywhere else, thought I suppose he must have done so sometime and somewhere. He had three themes: (1) more regimented behavior in the pews and at the communion rail (don’t show up late, fill the entire pew, move forward, move along sharply after receiving communion, etc.); (2) give more money; and (2) keep the “undesirables,” his code word for blacks, out of the neighborhood. (I will write a separate letter about religion and race as I grew up.
Monsignor Malloy had a number of priests who worked for him, known as ‘curates’ within the Church.
Father Schmidt was a very short, gruff, taciturn and distant old man who was popular with the altar boys (including me) because he said the 6:30 a.m. weekday masses in 12 minutes, never 11 minutes, never 13 minutes, but 12 minutes. Wham, bam, thank you mam, Offertory, Consecration, Communion and out the door in 12 minutes. He accomplished this daily feat by mumbling the mass. A “high mass” was a missa cantata, a mass in which the worshippers responded to the priest’s prayers was a missa recitata, and a Father Schmidt mass was a missa mumblata. Since the mass was in Latin, no one knew what the words were anyway. He would say the first Latin word or two so that we altar boys could pick up our cues for our mumbled responses and then mumble everything in between the cues. Father Schmidt: Introibo mumble mumble . . Altar boy: Ad Deum mumble mumble . . .[5] Father Schmidt’s masses were like Littlechap’s political stump speech in Anthony Newley’s musical Stop the World I Want to Get Off! : “Mumbo jumbo roobah doobah chickedeeboobah cha cha cha . . .” Father Schmidt had to read the gospel in English, but he managed to do this in quicktime by avoiding all inflection and any intonation suggesting punctuation or meaning. His Sunday masses took about 20 minutes because there were many more people including communicants present for his accelerated liturgy and he had to give a sermon. His Sunday sermons, however, were all ‘canned,’ He read them from little preprinted pamphlets, again without benefit of inflection or suggestion of punctuation in the text or of meaning.
Father Devereaux was a younger middle aged priest who had a friendly manner, too friendly as I reflect on it. He was the confessor of choice for pubescent boys concerned about going to Hell for eternity because of what was happening with their penises and the impure thoughts that plagued their minds and troubled their souls (because they liked them.) Father Devereaux would hear your confession about anywhere and anytime by taking you into a corner or a vestibule or some semi-private place, throwing his arm around your shoulder, head or neck like a grappling hook, pulling you tightly into his chest, listening to you acknowledge your impure thoughts and deeds and then shriving you in return for three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys and your resolve not to sin again (fat chance.) These physically close encounters of a weird kind with Father Devereaux were unhealthy to say the least. As I look back on confessions with him, I wonder what he was doing with his other hand while holding the penitent fast with the grappling hook. It’s hard for me not to believe that he was homosexual with a taste for pubescent boys. He was also though the easiest path to God’s forgiveness of our besetting mortal sins of impurity. If my suspicions about him are correct, I suspect there were some boys in St. Leo Parish who were victims of his sexual abuse. Of course, I hope my suspicions are wrong.
The most popular priest was a young fellow named Father Burke. He was friendly and open without any hint of being manipulative or predatory. I remember only two things about him. One, that I liked him. Two, that he was delegated to come into our 7th and 8th classes before summer vacation to give us the temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-avoidance-of-occasions-of-sin talks. In large part because the American Catholic Church was so thoroughly an Irish Catholic entity, the avoidance of ‘the solitary vice,’ of ‘self-abuse,’ of anything having to do with s-e-x was about as important as defeating Godless Communism and keeping the “undesirables” out of our neighborhoods. Father Burke told us boys (the girls of course were in another classroom waiting to get their temple-of-the-Holy-Ghost-never-BE-an-occasion-of-sin-for-a-boy talk) that staying in a bathtub or shower any longer than was necessary to remove the dirt from our bodies was inviting damnation. Better a soiled body than a sullied soul.
Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic experience. While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation. The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20thcentury. Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second. For ten seconds. For ten minutes! Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!! And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY! And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old. This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep.
At least if one did slip into a sin of the flesh meriting burning in Hell for all eternity, the sin could be forgiven by coming alongside Father Devereaux and being grappled. One sin and only one sin was unforgivable: hating the Holy Ghost. I believe I learned this in the 5th or 6th grade from one of the Sisters of Providence who had it on the highest authority:
"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."-- (Matt. 12:31-32)
As soon as I learned of this unforgivable sin and that I must never say “I hate the Holy Ghost”, I was constantly pursued by the Evil One tempting me to say “I hate the Holy Ghost.” I was a 10 or 11 year old neurotic haunted by the soft siren call “Go on, say it. Say you hate the Holy Ghost. Go on, say it.” I still remember the terrible day I was dispatched by my teacher, Sister Mary Chalkdust, to take the wastebasket downstairs and empty it. All the way down the back steps at St. Leo Grammar School I struggled against my obsessive wrestling against thinking the words “I hate the Holy Ghost.” No. Don’t say it. It’s unforgivable! No use. I thought the words in a complete sentence: “I hate the Holy Ghost.” I was done for and I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet.[6]
There was another bit of spiritual and cognitive dissonance we were faced with. All of us Clausen and Cummings cousins were sent to Catholic schools and packed off to church for mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation. Failure to attend mass was of course a mortal sin and remember that lighted match and gazillions of years. But none of the adults in our family went to mass! What did that mean? How could that be? Were my mother and father and grandparents and uncles all going to Hell? My father was in his own personal Hell already, but my mother? Grandma? Grampa? Uncle Jim? The fires of eternity loomed? What was I to make of this? It was pretty clear to me that my father and probably my uncles and grandparents thought all that church stuff was a bunch of bullshit. I suspect that whatever religious faith my father may have had drowned in blood on the black sands of Iwo Jima. But my mother was Catholic through and through, a real believer. That’s why she insisted over my father’s objections that Kitty and I go to Catholic schools. If I were to believe what the nuns and priests told me (and not believing it was itself a Sin Against Faith,[7]) my mother, the best and most important and most loved person in my life, was in a state of mortal sin, lacking Sanctifying Grace, and doomed to Hell unless she was lucky enough to get to confession before she died. With my rebellious and tumescent temple of the Holy Ghost coupled with my self-professed hatred of the Holy Ghost and my mother’s skipping Sunday mass, it was clear we were both doomed. At least we would be together in eternity, along with Grandma, Grampa Dewey, Grampa Denny, Uncle Jim, Uncle Bud, my father and who knows who else.
I can now half-laugh at the absurdities that were beaten into my head and my heart as a child under the spiritual authority of Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Stritch, Monsignor Malloy, and the Sisters of Providence, but of course it wasn’t one bit humorous as I lived through it. Along with the horrors of living each day in this world with my father’s abysmal unhappiness and alcoholism, I had the Church doing all in its power to convince me that there was no hope for me (or my family) even in the next world. I cannot think of all that hellfire and damnation brainwashing that we went though other than as, at best, the sick visions of some deeply neurotic people and, at worst, as willful child abuse by those who knew they were speaking untruths. The deeply neurotics included many of the priests and nuns as is evidenced in Karen Armstrong’s wonderful biography about her life in a convent Through the Narrow Gate, Andrew Greeley’s Uncertain Trumpet, and by other writings about life within the clerical and religious castes. The child abusers included many others, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers, who were willing to toe the party line of the official Church for career reasons and/or for social control reasons knowing that what they said was pure bullshit.
In Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit, he wrote:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Whose purpose was served by having children believe that the ground they walked on was a moral minefield and that at any moment they could stumble into eternal perdition? When the disciples saw the people bringing little children to him, they sternly ordered them not to do it. What was accomplished other than the creating of more neurotics whose lives were driven by fear rather than love? Those who benefited from the Moral Reign of Terror, of course, were those in the clerical or priestly caste. Those of us in mortal fear of eternal damnation had one practical way out, and that was to repair to the confessional to be shriven by a priest. Absolution was the ticket to Heaven and the priestly caste had monopoly power over the tickets. The popes and the bishops, for their part, owned the railroad.
The disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of stumbling blocks!” Matt. 18:1-7
Woe indeed. Stumbling blocks indeed. What anguish we suffered if we believed, and believe I did. What threats we endured if we couldn’t believe, a sin against Faith. Repression, suppression, oppression were the hallmarks of the Irish Catholic Church and the American Church was an Irish Church. Wonderment about matters religious that might deviate from the Teachings of the Church? Sinful. Normal maturing through emerging sexuality in childhood and adolescence? Sinful. Failing to toe the line with all the laws of the Church, like “making your Easter duty?” Sinful.
As I look back on those days, what strikes me more than the spiritual and emotional pain the Church put us through is what the Church didn’t do. It didn’t help us. It didn’t help us grow up. Not emotionally, not spiritually, not religiously. It was in great measure negative and life-denying. Having grown up in that cold Irish spiritual environment, William Blake’s church poems immediately appealed to me, poems like Garden of Love.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
and The Little Vagabond
Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.
But if at the Church they would give us some Ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.
Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing,
And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.
And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel,
But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel.
In the Irish American Church of my youth, however, there was no “God like a father rejoicing to see His children as pleasant and happy as he.” It was a Church of little joy, little delight, little peace, little awe, but no lack of dogmas, doctrines, rituals and rules, sins and sufferings.
If the Church was cruel to its children ‘born in the bosom of the Church,’ it was no less cruel to adults, especially mothers. The rules on birth control and divorce were – and still are- misogynistic and they affected my mother deeply. Though she was married to a man who was, because of the PTSD or for whatever reason, not much of a husband and father, she was not free to divorce him. Their marriage had been a proper Catholic wedding, performed in church and ‘in the Church,’ and thus was indissoluble. “What God hath put together . . .” If she had not been a poor Irish semi-orphaned daughter of a hod carrier, but rather a wealthy or otherwise powerful person, she, like the elites, could have bought herself a Church annulment, with the approval of all the priests, bishops, cardinals and the Pope himself. Pursuing that course however would have bastardized Kitty and me and I’m confident that, for that reason and probably because of her sorely-tried loyalty to my father, she never would have made that choice. But as it was, she had no choice because, like most other women in the world, she was neither rich nor powerful and was thus tethered to my father for life, no matter how awful, no matter how destructive, the marriage. One thing she did have control over was not bringing other children into the marriage. She was barely able to keep the four of us in the roach-infested basement apartment with shoes on our feet, clothes on our back, and food on the table. In our circumstances, having more children would have been disastrous and so she practiced birth control for which her Holy Mother Church told her she was in mortal sin and unable to share in the sacramental life of the Church. This was the reason that Kitty and I went to Mass on Sundays without her. This was why I, and surely Kitty, were put to wondering whether our beloved mother, not our “Holy Mother, the Church” but the human one, the flesh and blood one, the loving and sacrificing and suffering one, was doomed to an eternity in flames.
I mentioned earlier that the Church was the greatest influence on Kitty and me other than our family. It would be hard to overstate the centrality of the Church in our lives in the post-war, pre-Vatican II era. Mondays through Fridays we were in the care of the Sisters of Providence, with prayers and religion classes every day of the school week. Every piece of school paper we turned in had “JMJ” (Jesus, Mary and Joseph) and a “+” on the top of the page. Friday afternoons during Lent and Advent were for Stations of the Cross and Benediction. Saturday was Confession day. Sunday of course was Mass. Baptisms, First Holy Communions, Confirmations, marriages and funerals were all occasions for churchgoing and family gatherings. There were four ‘daily masses’ Monday through Saturday mornings, 6:30, 7:15, 8:00, and 8:45, and those of us of the male persuasion (girls weren’t allowed and still aren’t in many parish venues) who were able to learn the Latin (Ad Deum mumble mumble . . .) served as altar boys at these masses for three years, 6th, 7th and 8thgrades. On weeknights there were various “Devotions” during the year: benedictions, novenas, 40 hours adoration, stations of the cross and so on. There were weekend retreats for men and separate ones for women. Women who had given birth were “churched” after weekday morning masses. Marian devotions were huge: devotions to Our Lady of Fatima and to Our Lady of Lourdes and to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, devotions relating to the Miraculous Medal, the May Crowning of the main statue of Our Lady, and of course rosary beads were prayed by everyone. During Lent and Advent we fasted and abstained as directed by the Church. Throughout the year, we abstained from meat on Fridays, forming fish fry and macaroni and cheese habits that for many of my generation have lasted a lifetime. On top of all the liturgies and devotions, there were also many social groups organized around the parish: the Holy Name Society for men only, Altar and Rosary Society for women only, the Happy Death Society, the Men’s Sodality, the Women’s Sodality, St. Vincent de Paul Society and so on. Finally, there were parish bowling leagues, basketball and softball leagues, the Catholic Youth Organization boxing and other sports tournaments and weekly bingo games.
Dayenu. As if the liturgies and devotionals and social organizations were not enough to set us apart and to ensure the centrality of the Church in our lives, there was also the shunning of people and things beyond the control of the Church. Going to a wedding or a funeral in a non-Catholic church or synagogue was forbidden. (Attending a regular worship service of course was unthinkable, tantamount to apostasy.) Attending public schools rather than Catholic schools was forbidden if there was a Catholic school available and in Chicago there was always a Catholic school available (if you weren’t African-American.) Socializing with non-Catholics was discouraged. Marrying ‘outside the Faith’ was strongly discouraged, with both the Catholic and the non-Catholic who failed to convert made to jump through hoops to ensure that any children would be baptized and raised Catholic. Dating non-Catholics? An occasion of sin. There were plenty of good Catholic girls at Mercy High School and Mother MacCauley taught by the Sisters of Mercy, at Visitation taught by the Sinsinawa Dominicans, and at the many other Catholic girls’ schools. We met the Catholic girls through common Catholic friends, or because we went to Catholic elementary school together, or at Catholic socials, like the weekly chaperoned ‘sock hops’ at St. Sabina parish just west of St. Leo parish. When we met another Catholic, we identified ourselves by parish, not by neighborhood. It was no accident that my first three girlfriends, Shirley Jankowski, Maureen Boyle, and Charlene Wegge (rhymes with “Peggy,”) were all Catholic. We shared a common culture: Chicago Catholic.
With almost a million and a half Catholics living in Chicago, organized into largely self-contained parishes under the control of the Cardinal Archbishop, it was pretty easy for Catholic children to grow up in a very Catholic environment, not quite sociologically and psychologically ghettoized, but approaching it. I didn’t have a good friend who was not Catholic until I was 16 or 17 years old when I became friends with Dave Sinclair, a Protestant who lived down the block from us.[8] We both worked as stockboys at a food and liquor store on the corner of 74th and Halsted owned by Wally Halperin, the first Jew I ever met. The store was kitty-corner from ‘the Greeks,’ where my mother started her waitressing career. Dave Sinclair was an altogether good guy who attended our neighborhood public high school, Calumet. I saw no reason why he shouldn’t be eligible for Heaven notwithstanding his non-membership in the One True Religion and Church. Wally, on the other hand, though very good to Dave and to me, clearly wasn’t saved because he stashed ‘girlie magazines’ in the stockroom at the back of the store, which of course Dave and I peeked at. More mortal sins for me, but no effect for Dave since he wasn’t Heaven-bound to begin with.
Until my exposure to Wally and Dave at the liquor store, my world was thoroughly Catholic: Catholic church, Catholic elementary school, Catholic high school, Catholic friends, Catholic (in a manner of speaking) family members. The ‘best’ hospitals were the Catholic hospitals, like Little Company of Mary. The ‘best’ old age homes were the Catholic old age homes, like the Little Sisters of the Poor. The only movies we could attend were those that passed muster with the Catholic Legion of Decency, whose movie ratings were published every week in the archdiocese’s Catholic newspaper, The New World. When television arrived on the scene, the programs, unlike post-war movies, were family-oriented and non-threatening (Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Howdie Doodie, I Remember Mama, etc.), but on Tuesday nights we all watched Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s network program Life is Worth Living, even though it ran opposite The Milton Berle Show. Sheen was an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of New York, under the powerful Cardinal Spellman. It speaks to the size and influence of the American Church in the 1950’s that the first national televangelist was a foppish[9] Catholic hierarch and not a Jimmy Swaggert or Pat Robertson or even Billy Graham.
I have scratched the surface of some of the besetting sins of the Church I knew as a child and a youth: clericalism, legalism, authoritarianism, sexism coupled with a morbid sexual obsessiveness, racism, secrecy and superstition. It was an institution marked by pride and arrogance and an addiction to power and control. St. Paul admonished the Colossian Christian community “as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” These virtues were for the sheep, Pius X’s ‘docile flock,’ not for the shepherds. The besetting sins of the Church existed long before the mid-20th century and well beyond the archdiocese of Chicago. Some of them pre-dated but became fixed by the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 and they were still around at and after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
It was my experiences with the official Church, the Church as power structure and Establishment that started me on the road to philosophical anarchism, a personal philosophical rejection of the notion of Authority. Power and gospel values do not coexist comfortably. That is the essential contradiction within the official Church, an inherent contradiction at the very heart of the Church. My later experiences with the United States government during the Vietnam War and with all sorts of governmental and other power structures confirmed a deep-seated rejection of anyone’s or any entity’s claim to Authority, at least outside of a parent/small child relationship. It was Pius X’s power play in asserting papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council that led Lord Acton, one of a handful of British peers who was Roman Catholic and an opponent of the Pope’s power grab, to pen the famous ‘Acton’s axiom’:
If there is any presumption, it is . . . against holders of power, increasing as the power increases . . . Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
To which I say “Amen.”
In the summer of 2001, the archdiocese closed St. Leo Grammar School. The following summer the parish itself was shut down. There were only 300 registered families in the parish, all African-American. Only about 200 souls attended mass on Sundays. The parish had a debt of $1.1 million. The 95 year old church building needed roof repairs, electrical rewiring, bathroom replacement and stained glass window restoration. The 86 year old school building was also in bad shape. The end of St. Leo’s parish had come. In October, 2004, the church was demolished, making way for a home for homeless veterans to be called St. Leo Residence for Veterans. A joint effort of the Veterans Administration and Catholic Charities, the residence will provide health care and employment assistance as well as shelter to 120 – 140 of the approximately 8,000 homeless veterans on Chicago’s south side, all or almost all of them “undesirables.” Monsignor Malloy, sic transit gloria mundi.
[1] “Nuns” within the Church are only those religious sisters who live a cloistered life and thus run no schools. The schools were run by religious sisters whom we mistakenly referred to as “nuns.”
[2] In 2003, there were 244 parish elementary schools and 7 high schools operated by the archdiocese.
[3] Monsignors were of three types: chaplain to His Holiness, prelate of distinction, or Prothonotary Apostolic. One or two of these appointments expired with the pope who made the appointment. The other(s) did not.
[4] In the six years after becoming pastor, Fr. Malloy built an addition to the parish grammar school, renovated the church building, renovated the entire high school building including the large chapel, built a new three story brick residence for the Irish Christian Brothers, a new convent for the Sisters of Providence, and a new rectory for the parish priests. He built these of course not with his own money, but by seemingly unending second collections and sometimes third collections at Sunday masses. Thus are many monsignors made.
[5] Celebrant: Introibo ad altare Dei (I go unto the altar of God). Response: Ad Deum qui lastificat juventutem meum (To God who gives joy to my youth.)
[6] The current official Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes a separate paragraph to this sin. “”Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Mk. 3:29; cf. Mt 12:32; Lk 12:10. There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss.” This explanation seems considerably softer in its impact on the sinner than the original language in Mark. Had I known this when I was 10 or 11 years old, I wouldn’t have struggled so much with the ‘unforgivable sin.’
[7] In the hierarchy of prayers, right after the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and the Apostles’ Creed came the Act of Faith: “O my God, I firmly believe that Thou art one God in three Divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; I believe that Thy Divine Son became man, and died for our sins, and that He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe these and all truths which the Holy Catholic Church teaches, because Thou hast revealed them, who canst neither deceive nor be deceived.” How masterfully the Holy Catholic Church conflates itself with God.
[8] I exclude from the “good friend” category the Pine Crest Boys, my delinquent companions during my early adolescence. They were, I believe, all Protestants (wouldn’t you know!) but none of them was a good friend. I explain, perhaps too defensively, that I was younger than the others and a “hanger on.”
[9] My mother, who was a devoted fan of Bishop Sheen, would be disappointed that I call him a fop, but a fop he clearly was. He appeared each week wearing his most dramatic episcopal finery: the basic garment a black cassock gown with red piping and red buttons, topped by a black shoulder cape with the same red piping and an underside of red, all the red matching his zucchetto or skullcap and his dazzling Superman/Batman/Captain Marvel cappa magna¸ a flowing bright red floor length cape draped across his shoulders and tied with thin red sashes about his neck, directly above what appeared to be his platinum pectoral cross secured on a long, platinum or silver or white gold chain, while his midriff was secured by a broad red cincture that perfectly matched his piping, his buttons, and his zucchetto. He was, in a word, DAZZLING! In the Church’s sumptuary laws, the color red was normally reserved to cardinals, bishops ‘owning’ the color purple. Why Sheen wore red rather than purple in his television heyday is a mystery to me, but it may account, in small part, to the personal enmity between him, a mere auxiliary bishop, and his superior, the formidable Cardinal Spellman of New York. In his later telecasts, in the early 1960s, he wore the traditional purple, actually a shade of lavender. In the pre-Vatican II Church, in the Church before the pre-pedophilia scandal Church, these dazzling, feudal, European, ostentatious displays of capes and cassocks, satins and velvets and laces and brocades seemed to work their magic on the ever-obedient Faithful, who seemed to think it not bizarre to drop to one’s knees to kiss the ring of the episcopal dandies who ruled the Holy Mother Church. Indeed, to get to kiss the bishop’s ring and to receive his blessings was considered quite a privilege. How pathetic!
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