Sunday, May 3, 2026
1921 Northern Ireland was created under the UK Government of Ireland Act partitioning off six north-eastern counties with a Protestant majority
1926 US Marines landed in Nicaragua (9 months after leaving), stayed until 1933
1960 The Anne Frank House opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2007 Peter Charles Clausen was born at West Allis Memorial Hospital to his mother Anh Hoang Clausen and his father, Andrew Charles Clausen
In bed at 9ish, up at 5:30; 0545 155/78/54 119 204.0; 46/32/63/43, windy, overcast.
Morning meds at 10 a.m., and Bisoprolol at 6:45 a.m.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My back started acting up so I went back to back this morning and listened to, rather than read, where I am in Portrait, Chapter 3. I had forgotten what a superb job Joyce did in providing to the reading world an example of the Irish Catholic Church's teaching on Heaven and Hell, sin and its eternal consequences, and mostly, God's just punishment of his children who die not in a state of sanctifying grace, i.e., with at least one mortal sin on their soul. Growing up in that Church was living and being formed in a Reign of Terror. I relate to and react to Joyce's writing about it so intensely because I grew up in that Church. The American Catholic Church that I grew up in was an Irish Catholic Church. Most of the hierarchs were Irishmen, and perhaps they still are. Our archbishop in Chicago was Samuel Stritch, as Irish as Paddy's pig, as we used to say. Our parish pastor at St. Leo the Great parish was the Rt. Rev. Patrick J. Malloy, another Irishman. My teachers at Leo High School were the Irish Christian Brothers, mostly Irishmen. And, of course, my own blessed mother, Mary Healy Clausen, was the daughter of Dennis Healy and Catherine O'Shea Healy, both Irish immigrants. Here's just some of what I wrote of growing up in the Irish Catholic Church in the chapter of my memoir I titled "Born 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.
. . .
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-20th century. 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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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. . .
. . .
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.”
A page from my holographic watercolor sketchbook Live in the Time of Covid, living with the pandemic under Trump
I could have put sections of Joyce's Chapter 3 in today's journal, but the journal is a collection of reflection of thoughts I have thought and and of writings I have written about my life, not Joyce's. One of the great things about keeping a journal is that there are no rules. Personal journals are personal, just a form of diary. I wish I started journaling long before I was in my 80s and coming apart. I did journal on some of our trips to Europe and I've often picked them up and reread them to recall things I had long forgotten. But I suppose it's only on vacations and in retirement that we have the time and motivation to be scribbling in notebooks and writing thoughts on laptops.
The Heart Surgery. Geri and I had a long, serious, detailed, and good conversation this mornning about my upcoming heart surgery (and the recommended bladder surgery) and why the decision to have the surgery or to cancel it is not an easy one.
