Friday, April 25, 2025
D+170/96
1953 Francis Crick and James Watson's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA was published in "Nature" magazine
1971 About 200,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters marched on Washington, D.C.
2022 Twitter announced a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk for $44 billion
In bed at 9, awake and up at 3:40.
Prednisone, day 346; 2 mg., day 8/21; Kevzara, day 11/14; CGM, day 10/15; Trulicity, day 1/7. Prednisone at 6:40 a.m. Other meds and Trulicity injection at 7:15 a.m.
Small Things Like These is a 2024 Irish historical drama based on a novel by Claire Keegan. It stars Cillian Murphy as Bill Fulong, a coal dealer in New Ross, County Wexford, Eileen Walsh as his wife Eileen, and Emily Watson as Sister Mary, the Mother Superior of a local convent, girls' school, and a home for unwed mothers, i.e., a 'Magdalene laundry.' I watched the first hour of the film last night before going to bed at 9, and the last half hour this morning when I got up. I hesitated to write anything about the film because I was so moved by it. It's a slow-moving story and it's dreary, reminding me of Paris, Texas. I wondered if a viewer had to be Irish to like it, but of course that isn't true, though the film is suffused with a distinctly Irish gloom. It is set in the days before Christmas, 1985, when the days are short, cloudy, and cold, and at its powerful, quiet, dramatic conclusion, I thought of the concluding lines of James Joyce's The Dead:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Those lines of Joyce's played a role in the last movie Geri and I watched, another heavy 2024 film by Pedro Almodovar, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, The Room Next Door. It is about suicide and assisted suicide, deciding when one's life is complete and it's time to go. Small Things Like These, though, is not about death, but rather about life - life in Ireland under the thumb or boot of the Irish Catholic Church. Ireland, where sexuality was always and everywhere stifled, suppressed, crushed by priests and nuns warning of mortal sins, filth, impure thoughts and impure deeds, defilement of 'the temple of the Holy Ghost,' and damnation to eternal Hellfire. Bill Furlong was the beloved son of a young, unwed mother, Sarah Furlong. Sarah was a maid for a wealthy landowner, Mrs. Wilson, who provided a home and otherwise supported Bill and his mother, who was rejected by her family and 'good' society, and who, but for the support of Mrs. Wilson, would have been placed in a Magdeline laundry run by the Church. Sarah died of an unspecified cause at age 25, and Bill was raised by Mrs. Wilson with help from her farmhand, Ned, who appeared to be Bill's father. Bill grew up, became the owner of his own coal business, married, and had 5 daughters. He is haunted (perhaps too strong a word) by memories of his childhood, his mother, and Ned. One of his customers is the local convent with its school and home for orphans and 'wayward girls.' On one of his deliveries, he encounters Sarah, a pregnant teen, who notably has the same name as his mother. The film is about his rescue of Sarah, his struggle with his conscience before the rescue, and the complicity of Irish society in the cruelties of the Irish Church and Irish culture. There isn't much memorable dialogue in the film. The talking scenes that stand out are (1) Bill's wife discouraging him from being troubled about the plight of the pregnant girls in the nuns' care, (2) the local pub owner doing the same, and (3) the conversation between Mother Superior Sister Mary and Bill after he brought the freezing, pregnant Sarah in from the coal shed where she had been banished for some unspecified misconduct. The visual scenes that stand out are of Sarah cowering in the coal shed. of Bill's haunted/tortured face, of Bill's washing his hands, and of Bill's walking and then carrying Sarah away from the nuns to his own home. It is a story of Bill's heroism but also of his suffering and of the suffering of his mother Sarah, and of the young Sarah he redeemed from the nuns, from the Church, and from the Irish culture that was so complicit in so much suffering.
I failed to list above another of the film's powerful scenes, the one in which Sister Mary leads the congregation in church in a responsorial prayer;
[Sister Mary] The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy. He does not treat us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our faults.
Response: The Lord is compassion and love.
As the heavens are high above the earth, so strong is His love for those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far does He remove our sins.
Response: The Lord is compassion and love.
As the Father has compassion for his children, the Lord has pity on those who fear him, for He knows of what we are made. He remembers that we are dust.
Response: The Lord is compassion and love. The love of the Lord is everlasting upon those who fear Him. His justice reaches out to the children's children when they keep His covenant in truth.
Response: The Lord is compassion and love.
Sister Mary had earlier bribed or extorted Bill Furlong to keep quiet about the abuse of young Sarah in the coal shed and the director's camera stays focused on Bill's face during much of the prayer.
The film reminds me, of course, of the saying apocryphally attributed to Yeats, "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." There is so much sadness, melancholia, and gloominess inherent in Irishness. Much of it is attributable to Ireland being an occupied nation under Cruel Britannia for so many centuries, but much of it is also attributable to the Irish Catholic Church. The American Catholic Church is, or perhaps I should say was, in large measure, an Irish Catholic Church. I was perhaps more keenly aware of the Church's Irishness because my grandparents were Irish immigrants and my mother a first-generation American, but 'as Irish as Paddy's pig.'
From the "Raised in the Bosom of the Church" section of my memoir:
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. . . .
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. 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 8th grades. 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.
Back to
Small Things Like These, with my background in the Irish-American Catholic Church, it's perhaps not surprising that I wondered whether a viewer had to be Irish and Catholic to fully appreciate the film. The film ends, by the way, with a dedication:
Dedicated to the more than 56,000 young women
who were sent to Magdalene institutions
for "penance and rehabilitation"
Between the years 1922 and 1998.
And the children who were taken from them.
I am reminded of Sinead O'Connor who was just 14 years old when she was sent to the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity laundry, in Dublin, after she was labeled a "problem child." She spent 18 months there. This particular Magdalene Laundry only shut its doors in 1996. About it, she said in an interview:
“It was a prison. We didn’t see our families, we were locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood. We were told we were there because we were bad people. Some of the girls had been raped at home and not believed. One girl was in because she had a bad hip and her family didn’t know what to do with her. It was a great grief to us.”
O'Connor was outspoken about the Catholic Church during much of her professional career. In 1992 while appearing on "Saturday Night Live", she famously ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II saying "We have confidence in good over evil. Fight the real enemy!"
